Journalist Aaron Mak covered the Black Lives Matter riots in Milwaukee earlier this month. There he witnessed brutal attacks carried out by the protestors on people who were white or at the very least appeared white.

The protests took place after a Black police officer shot and killed an armed black man who had refused to comply with the officer’s orders. The shooting appears to have been standard operation procedure and entirely justified as the officer’s life was in danger. The protests quickly turned into rioting and looting. From there the situation devolved even further into a witch hunt, with the rioters attacking anyone who was not Black.

Mak is Chinese American and he was covering the rioting with a co-worker who was White. In his story for Politico, Mak described the racist encounter. “Get your white ass out of here,” the protestors told Mak’s white coworker. “You better not let me (expletive) catch you!”

The racist rioters chased off Mak’s friend but Mak wasn’t able to get away. The crowd quickly surrounded him and brutally beat him. “As a former back-of-the-pack runner in middle school gym class, I wasn’t surprised when they caught me. When they threw me to the ground, I reflexively curled up into a ball. Blows landed on my back, head and torso,” Mak said.

In the midst of the beating, a voice shouted out “Stop! He’s not white! He’s Asian!” The beating stopped and a bystander was able to pull Mak to safety.

What Mak experienced was pure racism, people being targeted and attacked because of the color of their skin, the very thing that BLM and their supporters in the liberal media claims to stand against. With the perfect opportunity to speak out about what the Black Lives Matter protests are really about, Mak let the opportunity go to waste. Instead of speaking out against the blatant racism, he tried to justify the beating he endured.

“I’ve covered protests against police brutality before, and see it as a responsibility of the press to convey the pain and grief that can result from misuse of power.

But as an Asian-American who’s concerned with systemic racism, it would be naive for me to pretend—especially in moments like this, when anger over the treatment of African-Americans bubbles over into violence—that race wasn’t part of why people came out to protest in Milwaukee, or part of sifting out who belongs there.

As race and police violence become a higher-profile issue in America, many Asian-Americans are still trying to figure out where—or if—we fit in to the movement. Black Lives Matter is the highest-profile effort to push for minority rights in America right now. It was born of grievances just like those we’re seeing in Milwaukee; at each killing, whether Milwaukee or Baton Rouge or St. Paul, BLM emerges as the voice pushing for police accountability, for the full dignity of Americans who’ve been deprived of it.